


it's you that I hear so loud and so clear

by aphrodite_mine



Category: Damages
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphrodite_mine/pseuds/aphrodite_mine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three drabbles, Ellen/Patty, Damages season 2. Written for abydos_dork. 1011 words total. Title and other lyrics from the song “Shiver” by Coldplay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's you that I hear so loud and so clear

1.  
 _I’ll be there by your side, just you try and stop me_

2.  
The drink in her hand isn’t enough to make her ignore the phantom buzz of her phone, humming in her purse. No messages.

“I swear to god, it was probably the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” Katie finishes, offhandedly. “Is that Patty?” Her tone turns pointed, dark.

“It’s no one.” It’s no one.

“I don’t know how you do it, Ellen. Look her in the face every day.”

She doesn’t, does she? Not in the same way. Not since she woke up in this kind of nightmare, not since David, and the blood in the bathroom, not since Frobisher. She takes a long sip of her wine, tries to control the heating of her face. She’s angry, angry all the time now. “I do it because I have to, Katie.” She has a job to do, to take down Patty for every one of her sins. No matter what she does, nothing seems to get crossed out. There aren’t any more good days, not now.

“I know. You’ve said that. But.” Katie’s eyes on her are judging. She has to look away.

Ellen checks her phone again. No messages. Her thumb runs across the keys and her throat constricts.

There  _are_  good days, sometimes. Days so good and so far away from David, and finding him like that, and the color of the blood against the tile (the stark brownish red against the white), days so far away from all of that, that she doesn’t say his name to herself once, that she smiles, and moves through the space of twenty-four hours without stopping, without taking a moment to breathe. And when she does, when she sits at her desk with the pile of paperwork — on the Hewes and Associates letterhead — she hates herself, because this is what she has become, and this is what he was afraid of. This is what he died for.

Another drink, another flick of her phone.

“Jesus, Ellen. Just go to work already. You aren’t even here.”

No messages.

She goes. Is there anywhere else to go? The empty office buzzes to life with the flick of a light switch, full of locked doors and shadowy hallways. Her office is tucked away, and the quiet here sends chills down her spine. There is a picture of David on her desk, smiling at her from some distant memory. Behind him, down the hall, the logo for Hewes and Associates, and she squints and the two run together. Silvers and blues and browns.

There’s a long wait, just sitting at her desk. Moments tick by, and Ellen doesn’t remember why she came.

An excuse, a reason: she logs on to her computer and prints some materials. David smiles. She flips him over, a sound catching in her throat. Don’t watch, she thinks, and breathes in and out, feeling how the halls are filled with her, with Patty, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to escape.

She wonders if she even wants to.

3.  
She dreams of Patty, of the house.

She recognizes this, the sequence of events. A kind of lucid understanding that this will happen, that David will die, that she will lie down on the sofa and the man will come, with the knife. In the dream, Ellen cries out. She shakes herself awake.

This is different, this time. Patty is holding the door open for the man, his knife glistening at his side.

The sound of shattering glass.

And here they are, again, sitting at a table, at Patty’s table, and Patty has a glass of something in her hand, swirling slowly. She can smell the alcohol in the air, on her breath, but Ellen doesn’t back away. She isn’t afraid. She hasn’t been afraid for a long time. In the dream, Ellen doesn’t remember what fear feels like.

Patty pushes a glass towards Ellen across the wooden surface, polished to a high shine. When does Patty have time to do things like this, like polishing a table and pouring drinks, Ellen thinks, like be a mother and a wife and Hewes and Associates, and.

She is pouring Ellen a drink and it is all deceptively simple. Moments. Condensation grows on the glass and Ellen traces a word there, feeling the water droplets collect on her fingertip and then fall, like the slowest dance, down the surface.

Patty is barefoot, in the dream, and she pulls her feet off of the floor like a little girl. “Do you like it here?” she asks, and Ellen sees her, suddenly, as a child. Freckles across her nose. She touches Patty’s hair, and her hand comes away bloody. Soaked in red, red, red.

She doesn’t run away. She should. She doesn’t remember what it’s like to be afraid, in the dream.

Ellen licks her finger, slowly, and then picks up the offered glass. The blood mixes with the water and she lifts the bourbon to her lips to drink.

Patty stands up, crosses the room to the door. “Ellen,” she says, “I have a surprise for you.”

4.  
They make eye contact over his head, Patty nodding. Her eyes say  _go ahead_ , and Ellen’s eyes say  _all right_. It’s over in an instant, but she feels it, after, lingering. She takes over from there, easing out of her chair like the motion is natural. Like no one is watching her smooth her wrinkled Chanel dress and paste on a smile.

Patty nods, a calculated movement, her lips turned upwards just barely at the corners.

She feels something, a kind of drumming in her heart. Ellen collects her report — eyes swimming over the familiar words. She feels something, and she opens her mouth to speak.

5.  
 _I wanted to say / Don’t you shiver?_


End file.
